


Short scenarios of alternate history - TDiAH

by orphan_account



Category: Alternate History RPF
Genre: One Shot Collection
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-09
Updated: 2019-11-09
Packaged: 2021-01-26 08:13:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 4,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21370963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account





	1. Defeat at San Juan Hill

A great loss that could have ended the Spanish-American War earlier came at San Juan Hill. American General William Rufus Shafter's plan to take Santiago de Cuba depended upon securing the San Juan Heights overlooking the city. Also seeing the importance of the heights, Spanish General Arsenio Linares held only a small number of men in reserve in Santiago, placing nearly 10,000 troops to defend the heights.

The American direct attack on Kettle Hill with two divisions was pushed back at great cost of American life. A second assault successfully took Kettle Hill thanks to heavy fighting by buffalo soldiers of the 10th Cavalry, but nearby San Juan Hill would not be taken, despite the assault lasting late into the evening. Eventually the Americans would fall back, regroup with Lawton's 2nd Division (which had been dispatched to take the stronghold at El Caney) on July 2, and take the lesser-defended Santiago despite its precarious position. The threat of assault from San Juan would keep the American defenders pinned, and the war in Cuba would stagger on through many more months.

During the fighting, an amiable and excitable New Yorker named Theodore Roosevelt led a group of volunteer cavalry, the Rough Riders, collected from cowboys and Ivy League polo players. The men were held in reserve until the second assault, when Col. Roosevelt led the charge up the hill himself (arguably misinterpreting orders to reinforce as orders to advance). Roosevelt was killed in a counterattack on his north flank along with many of his comrades, a story that was much reproduced in the American newspapers, furthering the growing dissatisfaction with the war.

With the war not yet over in 1900, angry and dispassionate voters turned many of the Republicans out of office in the elections, instead favoring the Democratic nominee William Jennings Bryan. President Bryan would be credited with ending the war, though the Spanish had already begun to show desires of peace under McKinley's administration. Tragedy struck the nation in September of 1901 when anarchist Leon Czolgosz assassinated Bryan at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, NY. Vice-President Adlai Stevenson succeeded the president, taking up his policies of giving independence to the Philippines and busting up many of the nation's corrupt monopolies and trusts.

The American public's distaste with the Spanish-American War furthered its sense of isolationism. In the next decade, the United States would not participate in Europe's Great War (1914-1920), except in increasing American Naval power after the sinking of the _RMS Lusitania_. Instead, the US focused on domestic affairs such as Women's Suffrage and the Prohibition Movement. The 1920s brought strong, but not unparalleled, economic growth to the US as Europe rebuilt, only to fall into the Second Great War in 1939. Meanwhile, the US enjoyed two decades of domestic peace, with newspapers desperate for any interesting event, even the short 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial in which Clarence Darrow successfully defended the teaching of evolution on grounds of Free Speech.

Although giving aid to Allied Powers, the United States would remain out of the war until 1942, despite public outcry over 1941's British Landing where German troops devastated southern England before finally being rebuffed in a reversal of Dunkirk. Japan, which had conquered nearly unchecked in the Pacific through the 1930s (such as its speedy defeat of the Philippines), would draw in America with its Invasion of Hawaii on June 2, despite continuing guerrilla combat in British Australia. Eventually, Hitler's 1943 Operation Barbarossa would bring the USSR onto the side of the Allies, and GWII would be won with combined atomic arsenals of the United States and Soviet Union in 1945.


	2. The Declaration of Representation

With war raging in the American colonies for over a year and many whispering of independence, the Continental Congress voted to act on the idea of separating themselves from England. Narrowly, the proposition failed, and the Congress would turn its attention to reforming its governmental relationship with the mother country.

Many argued that Parliament's Prohibitory Act's blockade against American shipping effectively cut off the colonies from home earlier that spring. With a blockade, an act of war, the Crown was removing the colonists from his protection, rather than a quarantine of nationals. Lord North had intended the act to destroy the American economy, but wording was interpreted differently by the Navy. Any ship bearing loyal British colors was free to pass and, in fact, under the protection of British ships.  
  
While Thomas Paine's Common Sense stirred great eagerness for independence in the minds of the colonists, simple economics gradually wore away the enthusiasm. By June, as those still holding or at least feigning loyalty prospered, thoughts had turned back to the idea of representation. The public was indeed represented by their Continental Congress, who, after abandoning the idea of independence, created a formal declaration through a committee headed by philosopher Thomas Jefferson and lawyer John Adams, later an MP. They outlined Enlightenment ideals of what a government must to do for its people and what a people must do for its government.  
  
The American Rebellion continued until 1778 when the capture of a British army at Saratoga, New York, prompted William Pitt to speak out in Parliament for peace. Though many were adamant against the notion of letting the rebels go unpunished, Parliament voted to end the war before it left its bounds of domestic affairs and injured their position as world leaders (such as if the French became involved). An armistice was proposed, accepted by the Americans, and envoys met to discuss terms, eventually deciding to give the Americans the representation they demanded.  
  
The war was over, and the first American members of parliament arrived in 1780. Taxes were indeed levied, but the populace was happy to pay for the civilization they had fought hard to improve. Following the American success, representation flooded around the rest of the British Empire with towns like Manchester, outposts like the Falklands, and even parts of Canada soon holding their own positions in Parliament. These populist ideas even spread outside the borders of the empire, causing uproar throughout Europe, most notably in France's Revolutions of 1789 and 1792, establishing their peaceful and lasting constitutional monarchy.  
  
In 1857, India emulated the American rebellion in success, and non-white colonials were given citizenship and representation unparalleled before. With prosperous colonies, Britain maintained world leadership throughout the Victorian and Modern Eras. Although the World War dragged in trenches for years through the 1910s, the Second World War (or “Hitler's Little War”) was won handily by 1943. As Communism and the Post-Colonial movements began in the late '40s, England's might began to wane, and new talks of independence are spreading throughout the world where the sun cannot set on a British Empire.


	3. Dolly the Dinosaur

Scientists at the Roslin Institute in Scotland created the first large mammal clone, a sheep named Dolly. Using emptied egg-cells and the nucleus from a mammary adult stem cell from another sheep, Dolly was, genetically, identical to the donor sheep. A haphazard process, Dolly was the only of 277 lambs to survive to adulthood.

  
While celebrating successes, an inebriated biology student beneath Wilmut and Campbell on the project, William Howard, boasted, “Well, so what, I'm gunna clone maself a dinosaur!”  
  
Laughed off as the usual drunken banter of graduate students, the resulting angry spite from Howard caused him to pursue the project. He had no funding, but the widespread fame of Jurassic Park, the novel by Michael Crichton and film by Steven Spielberg, gained him notoriety. He used the newly developing Information Superhighway to start a message board, news group, and account for donations, usually only a few pounds, dollars, and, later, euros at a time. Picked up by the tabloids as perhaps a prank, Howard's popularity took off when he indicated that he was indeed serious.  
  
Howard collected funds, began his lab, worked building relations with leading paleontologists (at least ones that would take him seriously), and created a team of innovative biological technicians. While the lab practiced cloning birds and amphibians, Howard waited for a specimen. Many rumors spread that he would attempt a wooly mammoth first, but Howard routinely refused.  
  
In 2007, researchers at North Carolina State University under Mary Schweitzer claimed finding preserved material of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, clearly too good to be true as the king of the dinosaurs being the first to be cloned. Further research proved the material to be biological film, useless scattered bacteria.  
  
In 2009, Schweitzer's team used similar techniques to discover actual bone cells and minute fragments of blood vessels of a Brachylophosaurus. This was Howard's chance. Over the next few years, his lab isolated usable DNA, sequenced it, and managed to reconstruct a whole system. After two months gestation, the first dinosaur in untold generations hatched from a nest of artificial eggs created from those of an ostrich. She was named “Dolly” after her sheep technological ancestor. Contained in a hyperbaric chamber made to mimic Cretaceous Earth, the first dinosaur lived only a few days, but more of its sisters successfully grew into adulthood.  
  
Public outcry roared on positive and negative ends of the spectrum. Many claimed Howard was playing God, others said that he was leading mankind into a new era of ecological preservation. As he accepted his Nobel Prize, Howard repeated his drunken boast, affirmed it, and said he'd move on to mammoths now.  
  
A hyperbaric terrarium later opened at the London Zoo, the first of many where eager tourists walk among peaceful herds of duck-billed dinosaurs munching on fronds. Little interest has been made to reintroduce them to the wild in a world so changed from their own.


	4. The escape of Thomas More

Mere hours before his execution, Catholic loyalists managed to sneak Sir Thomas More, once a favorite of Henry VIII and now a nemesis for his dedication to the Pope, from his prison in the Tower of London. Henry declared a nationwide search, but More was able to escape from England and into France under the guise of a book-trader.  
  


In France, he shed his disguise and began to journey to Rome. Catholic supporters surrounded and protected him despite the impressive bounty offered on his head by Henry. Narrowly dodging two assassinations, More caught word that Henry himself was plotting war to capture the treasonous statesman by any means possible. He claimed no fear of the king or for his life, but he feared for bloodshed and sin resulting from war, and so he disappeared, falling in with Alpine monks under an assumed name.  
  
While Henry's rage never ceased, his life did, and his son Edward VI assumed the throne. Moving away from Catholicism, Edward and Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, imposed Protestantism and the infamous Book of Common Prayer. Upon his death at only 15, crisis followed with Lady Jane Grey's attempt at the throne, but Edward's half-sister Mary I managed to lay successful claim.  
  
Less than a month after her crowning, an elderly monk presented himself as the septuagenarian Thomas More. With his political craft as well as the advice of Cardinal Pole (replacement for Cranmer, whom Mary had burned at the stake), the queen was able to heal England's separation from Rome, albeit under a fairly reformed condition. Priests retained their right to marriage, but the Book of Common Prayer was destroyed alongside any editions of Tyndale's English Bible. The Marian Persecutions raged, chasing Protestants out of England and executing those who remained.  
  
Mary died in 1558, succumbing to what medical historians would later determine a hormonal disorder brought on by tumors. The aged More lived only a few months more, seeing the succession pass safely to the Catholic Mary, Queen of the Scots, as Mary I's sister Elizabeth had died at Hatfield House in a fire often found suspicious. England continued Catholic, despite the Protestant Rebellion of Oliver Cromwell in the 1650s.  
  
However, Henry VIII's short-lived separation from Rome always left its mark on the land and people, so much so that after the revolution of the American colonies led to the United States, the first amendment in their Bill of Rights read in 1789, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” While England called for a new Crusade against such unorthodoxy, the Enlightenment had shifted the interests of Europe, and Rome had lost much of its power. Humanism and material philosophy had made moot a question which, only a few centuries before, had nearly torn Europe apart.


	5. The Battle of Poltava

On a warm and humid night, Swedish troops under the command of Charles XII attacked and prevailed over a larger Russian army commanded by Peter I.

The Great Northern War had raged since 1700, when Denmark, Russia, and Poland attacked Sweden and its allies. Sweden under Charles XII turned back the tide of war, first opposing the Danish and Russian attacks, then in a counterattack defeating August the Strong (Elector of Saxony, King of Poland, and Grand Duke of Lithuania), driving him out of his throne and turning the lands into allies. With the Danes removed from the war by skillful maneuvers of the Swedish navy and army and August destroyed, Charles turned toward Russia.  
  
Peter I, rarely known as Peter the Great, had spent the years Sweden fought into modernizing his army and making conquests in the eastern Baltic. His greatest stab at Sweden was founding Saint Petersburg in 1703 to solidify a port on what was once Swedish soil.  
  
Charles marched into Russia and the Ukraine (a longtime conquest of Russia) in 1708, having waited for the winter to freeze the Vistula River. He sent General Lewenhaupt out to gather supplies, which he did speedily that spring, rejoining Charles in the Ukraine with news of the improved Russian troops, which he had narrowly evaded by the Sozh River. Skirmishes and small battles had quieted any arrogance Lewenhaupt might have about Russian infantry.  
  
In 1709, having wintered with only minor losses thanks to the supplies secured by Lewenhaupt, Charles went to secure his supply lines in preparation for a campaign on Moscow. His first target was Poltava, which Peter had defended with improved bulwarks and 60,000 troops. Kalmyk allies to Russia were on their way to join Peter, so Charles acted quickly.  
  
Swedish cannon pounded the defenses, and, at 3:45 AM, Lewenhaupt led a stout Swedish attack of infantry. Because of the effective use of artillery, the Russian defenses folded. At 8:30 AM, Peter himself led a desperate counterattack from the north aided by his cannons. While the Russians routed Swedes initially, they pursued outside of the range of fire, and were routed. Peter was killed at the head of his troops, reportedly not dying from musket wounds until being torn limb-from-limb by cannon-fire.  
  
With the Tsar dead, the Russian troops retreated. Charles secured Poltava, rebuilt the defenses, and routed the incoming Kalmyk cavalry in such a defeat that they abandoned their Russian allies. Left with Peter's wife Catherine in command, Russia mounted a brave defense (though not daring enough for scorched earth). No armies could stand up against Charles' quick attacks. With newly liberated Ukraine giving supplies from the breadbasket of Europe, Charles arrived in Moscow in October, wintering there while working with Catherine over the details of her surrender. Rather than conquering Russia, Charles would make it an ally, a buffer against western Mongol bands. The Great Northern War had ended with Sweden victorious, effectively knocking Russia out of significance in Europe. Russia would remain an Asian power until its disastrous defeat by Japan in 1905.  
  
In Europe, Swedish power continued to grow. Charles was ceded Saint Petersburg (he kept the name) and maintained Baltic dominance. In the following century, Sweden would begin many important colonies all over the world in Africa, the East Indies, and the West Indies to build its naval power. While it would lose ground in the Seven Year's War, Sweden would injure its new enemy Britain by aiding its rebellious colonies in the 1770s and gain great conquests as Napoleon's ally until his betrayal in his disastrous attempt to conquer Stockholm in 1812. Then fighting opposed to Napoleon, Sweden was given Norway in 1814 at the Congress of Vienna.  
  
The nineteenth century would prove generous to Sweden, though World War I would devastate its navy as German U-boats tore through Swedish battleships. The loss of manpower in the Danish trenches and collapse of the world economy would tear the Swedish Empire apart, making way for the fascists to gain control in 1933. World War II would prove even more disastrous as the Allied Powers turned their attention to Sweden after the fall of Hitler. The Swedish Empire would be broken into pieces with liberated Norway, occupied Sweden, and Finland finally held once again by their old nemeses, the Russians. Gradually Sweden would fall to Communism in the late 1950s and try to reconquer its neighbor Norway, sparking the long and unresolved Scandinavian Conflict with its Demilitarized Zone stretching over 1000 miles.


	6. Hamilton Lives

On July 11, General Alexander Hamilton (former Secretary of the Treasury) and Colonel Aaron Burr (current Vice-President) met for a duel to settle their long-standing and ever-growing hatred for one another. Hamilton was leader of the Federalist Party and mastermind of politics and had recently given support to the opposing Morgan Lewis specifically to make Burr lose his bid for Governor of New York. Burr had been dropped from Jefferson's ticket in the 1804 election and had planned to secure more local political action, but now he only had rage against Hamilton.  
  


In the duel (which took place secretly on the Heights of Weehawken across the Hudson River from Manhattan as dueling was illegal), Hamilton shot to miss, wasting his powder to show courage but not malice in taking an aimed shot. Burr, however, shot and wounded Hamilton, nearly fatally. While Hamilton healed from a shattered rib (the bullet had struck along the side of his torso), Burr would flee for South Carolina to avoid charges of attempted murder. Though Burr would fulfill his year as Vice-President, his career in politics was over. His only further political actions would be rumored treasonous as he began illegal settlements in Mexican Texas, perhaps in hope of starting a war. While the actions were decried at the time, American expansionism in the West would eventually prove Burr a man ahead of his time.  
  
Hamilton continued working to wrest power from the “dangerous” Democratic-Republicans he feared would turn the United States into a mob of rabble. Jefferson won his second term in 1804, and his protege and Father of the Constitution James Madison would take the election of 1808. In 1812, the political climate would changed. Europe was embroiled in the Napoleonic Wars, which threatened to drag in the US as well with English as well as French naval ships plundering American vessels and “impressing” sailors into service.  
  
War Hawks called for a campaign against Britain and even an invasion of Canada in the spirit of expansionism (which many thought would be easily done with local support; Jefferson said it was a “mere matter of marching”). President Madison set an ultimatum that both France and Britain recognize their neutrality or face war. France sent communications (eventually proven misleading) that they would, and Congress very nearly declared war on Britain but for the political finagling of Hamilton. Without his war and the growing political discontent, Madison would lose the 1812 election to DeWitt Clinton of New York, the first Federalist president in twelve years.  
  
Clinton called for a strengthening of America's infrastructure, building roads that would lead to and aid in the later Indian Wars. As a member of the Erie Canal Commission, which others would see through with his assistance. Further, and perhaps most importantly, Clinton set to solve the problems of international quarrels by improving the navy of the United States beyond Jefferson's pocket-boat defense. Now a force to be reckoned with, Britain and France would recognize American neutrality, and after the defeat of Napoleon, a war-beleaguered Britain would sign the Treaty of Ghent with America, solving the issues that could have started a war only two years before.  
  
The Federalist Party would continue to challenge the Democratic-Republicans, though both would agree on the Monroe Bill (named after Senator Monroe of Virginia) that the US would not abide European interference in the Western Hemisphere. As the Spanish Empire collapsed to the south, Americans welcomed the growing Republicanism and used its fleet to dissuade Europe from further colonization. America itself would assure dominance with the Mexican War in 1846, but be true to Monroe's word in 1861 by aiding Mexico in overcoming the French and Spanish invasion by Maximilian (which also relieved growing tension on the question of slavery, later to be solved by the 1867 Emancipation Proclamation, promising ample government compensation to any owner willing to free his slaves).  
  
Pushing West and now south, American expansionism turned to annexing turbulent Latin American nations in the latter half of the nineteenth century. While accusations of “empire” were made and perhaps deserved, America grew powerful in the Western Hemisphere and increasingly Hispanic in background, creating a vivid diversity that would supply ample raw materials and labor for an Industrial Age. As the Cold War raged with the Soviet Union in the 20th century, America would see many of its states and territories fighting for their own independence fueled by Communist insurgents, igniting a Civil War over the question of states' rights.  
  



	7. The abort of Apollo 11

The Space Race held as the hottest direct contest between the USA and the USSR in the Cold War. After Russia had won the first two legs with the first artificial satellite Sputnik in 1957 and the first man in space Yuri Gagarin in 1961, America had finally gotten ahead with their 1968 flyby of the Moon. Russian leadership had begun to doubt their Luna program with its unmanned probes, but the political climate changed completely as disaster struck over Florida.

Just after launch, the Apollo 11 exploded, nearly killing its crew of Commander Neil Armstrong, Command Module Pilot Michael Collins, and Lunar Module Pilot Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, Jr,who parachuted to emergency rescue. While none can be certain of the cause of the disaster, many theories have arisen after much of the wreckage was salvaged. Most agree that it was a hydrogen “hiccup”, a less dense bubble that caused imbalance in the rocket, jarring it viciously and tearing the craft apart until the explosives fell out of control.  
  
While the United States recovered, the Soviets threw their resources into making up lost time. Automated docking of capsules had already been successful in 1968, and the manned Soyuz 4 and 5 missions had tested successfully the human elements involved. The Soviets planned to launch its cosmonaut to the surface of the Moon by September. Bad luck and mechanical problems slowed the launch until mid-October.  
  
Meanwhile, the United States refused to sit idly. While many began to call for an end to the space program and memories of Apollo 1’s fire still in the public mind, NASA had already secured its funding for the year and needed a success to guarantee that the program would not be shelved altogether. Apollo 12 would be their final chance. Hearing word of the Russian attempt, astronauts Charles Conrad, Jr, Richard Gordon, Jr, and Alan Bean would be put ahead of their November launch schedule to match the Russian deadline.  
  
The rockets launched within hours of one another, and scientists on both ends worked frantically to streamline the process of travel in action, but mission clocks were ticking without much room to spare. On October 16, 1969, Russian cosmonaut Alexei Leonov touched down on the surface of the Moon. Only an hour later, Conrad and Bean would follow. Despite the potential dangers, NASA had adjusted the flight path to put them down near Leonov’s capsule.  
  
Conrad would venture out of the American module and be followed out fifteen minutes later by Bean, after which Leonov would greet them having “walked” (bounced in the low gravity) from his half-mile distant capsule. His decision had been applauded and rejected by Russian mission control, but the effect was incredible upon public sentiment. The image of a cosmonaut and an astronaut shaking hands on the surface of the moon would be recorded by probe cameras and transmitted to televisions and newspapers the world over. Appropriately enough,Armstrong served as CAPCOM that historic day.  
  
President Nixon (who also made mention of the success of President Kennedy’s promise to arrive on the moon before the end of the decade) would capitalize on the image and, in 1971, meet with Nikolai Podgorny of the Soviet Union in Moscow. The historic meeting would bring new balance to the Cold War, and gradually disarmament would begin. Without the terrors of foreign powers and even the invasion of Czechoslovakia recalled, the Russian people would have enough of their Stalinist past and recreate their government with the 1977 Constitution returning much of the power into the hands of people. While still economically planned, democracy grew in Russia. Meanwhile, trade with the USSR began to lead the US into greater socialism, such as Carter’s reversal of Nixon’s privatized health insurance into a public, universal system.  
  
Now something as half-breeds of one another, the two head of the world continue to dance around one another for power. Technology has torn down walls (much like the fall of Berlin’s wall in 1989), while the growth of populations in developing countries such as China and India look to change the world balance altogether.


End file.
